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The  number of complaints launched against advertising company Google’s Street Views is significant, to understate the situation.

Its response is always, Problem? What problem?

But now, for the first time, Google is actually being sued by a government agency.

“Privacy regulators in a number of countries, including Italy, Germany and Japan, have raised concerns about the service but Google has been able to negotiate measures that have reassured them,” says the Financial Times, going on »»»

In Japan, it agreed to lower the height of the cameras taking pictures of the streets by 40cm to ensure they did not take images of people’s private gardens, while in Germany it agreed to erase the raw, identifiable photos of people and property from its system if individuals requested it.

Google also faced a private lawsuit in the US over the service, which was ultimately dismissed.

Google met Swiss data protection authorities in the run-up to launching Street View in Switzerland in September and was initially given the green light.

But  as p2pnet said last week, Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) Hanspeter Thuer llater complained about clearly visible faces and license plates.

“Google announced that it would primarily be filming urban centres, but then put comprehensive images of numerous towns and cities on the internet,” says the FT, going on:

” ‘In outlying districts, where there are far fewer people on the streets, the simple blurring of faces is no longer sufficient to conceal identities,’ said Mr Thür.

Now Thür says Google hasn’t done enough “to make faces and vehicle number plates unrecognisable on the service, which provides panoramic, street-level photos,” says the story, continuing:

“He has filed a motion seeking to freeze any expansion of Google’s activities under a temporary injunction. This would prevent Google from taking any further photography but would not require it to shut down the service entirely.”

Detailed online coverage

One also wonders if freedom groups will pick up on the possibility that Gargle’s Street View may also be acting as a kind of online racial profiling application.

p2pnet reader Marc “spent hours surfing Street View and p2pnet ran the results in what’s probably the only detailed online coverage of easily visible Street View images,” p2pnet reported for the first time on Saturday.

The story went on »»»

However, that’s not all he found.

Said Eric in a Reader’s Write to our latest post on Google’s  apparent intransigence, “I doubt those three guys sitting on the wall were having an abortion. ”

He was referring to one of the Google Street View pix showing an abortion clinic in Switzerland  identified by Marc and which we’d miniaturised for a 32-item montage. However, as we pointed out, “even at these very considerably reduced sizes, some of the people might still be recognizable”. So we obscured them in red.

Marc told Eric »»»

Nope, they were just sitting there about 1 block away from the abortion clinic. Sitting in front of their slum homes across the street.

What *is* significant is that most black people are not blurred at all. Most every black person I came across is in the same unblurred state.

A few things that I noticed that causes the “blur” to *not* kick in:

1. If you are non-white
2. If you wear shades or glasses
3. If you have a hat on (ie baseball cap)

From all the time I spent looking into this, the above 3 conditions are true, regardless of what anyone, or thing, has to say.

Check it out. You will also find this to be true.

The above 3 conditions hold true for gargle Swiss and boogle Canada (I only looked at these two in depth for many, many, hours).

It also holds true for Billboards, hence the billboard example in the pic above.

In the story, we’d included a spoofed KFC pic to illustrate a statement made by assistant privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham.

“We’ve found many instances where people’s faces aren’t blurred”, she said, according to the Canwest News Service, which went on, “In some cases, the face of KFC’s Colonel Sanders or faces on billboards captured in shots are blurred instead.”

Meanwhile, “Color/race determines if you are blurred with gogle,” said Marc. “It cannot be denied.”

Stay tuned.

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